Hello,
This suddenly seems like a not great moment to be ending regular service on this newsletter as planned. The virus is so broadly resurgent around the world that the WHO issued a warning this week that countries reopening too early risk losing hard-won gains against the pandemic, while countries like South Korea, which had previously been models for effective pandemic management, are seeing local outbreaks spiral out of control. In the U.S., infections are rising quickly in areas with low rates of vaccination — in Missouri an outbreak around Springfield has already overwhelmed one of the state’s largest hospitals, which ran out of ventilators this week and had to open a second ICU to treat the renewed flood of patients. Nationwide hospitalizations are on the rise again for the first time since April, almost entirely driven by life-threatening infections among people who have not been vaccinated. The near-term future of the pandemic in the U.S. very probably looks like the current situation in the U.K., where case counts are soaring but where, thanks to widespread vaccination, hospitalizations and deaths have so far remained low.
If in the beginning the pandemic was a long-apparent but distant “column of smoke on the horizon” that had rushed up to envelop us before there was time to react, now it’s a pervasive haze, an integral but not necessarily lethal feature of a permanently altered landscape. This was always one of the possible paths: that the virus would become endemic and circulate alongside its less-deadly coronavirus cousins, manageable with vaccines and treatments, still claiming thousands of lives a year, but not a runaway killer. What we’re seeing now is simply what that future actually looks like, now that we’re arriving into it.
So this will still be the last regular issue of The CovOdyssey. I may send out a supplemental every now and again if there are surprising, urgent developments. But the story of the pandemic from here on out is actually one that is becoming pretty familiar: some unusual calamity erupts and, rather than receding and returning everything to normal, it changes our baseline understanding of how it’s possible to live.
It’s a story becoming familiar through repetition. The emergence and persistence of HIV permanently changed attitudes and practices around sex. The 9/11 attacks and fear of future acts of terrorism ushered in a new regime of surveillance, preemptive warfare, and security precautions that still mark our culture, our politics, and our built environment. We’re crossing a similar threshold with climate change, which after decades of warnings now regularly produces conditions well outside our previous experience, the combined force of which will permanently warp social life in ways we can’t easily predict.
This is the dark side of the well-worn happy story of technological progress. New innovations bring revolutionary, broadly positive change. But these new technologies also produce strange new kinds of catastrophe when they fail, run amok, or “fall into the wrong hands.” More uncannily, in the 21st century disasters come as unintended consequences of technological success as well as directly from failure. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere driving global warming is the byproduct of a miraculous series of technological innovations for dependably detecting and extracting fossil fuels, refining them, and distributing them for use in a rapidly expanding global economy. The social internet is, likewise, a dazzling technical feat that has also produced such dangerous instability that a group of scholars recently took to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to call for the establishment of a new “crisis discipline” to produce the knowledge necessary to govern it.
Wherever you look, it seems, we’re locked in a reflexively accelerating race to solve new problems caused by our previous solutions.
Some time ago, just before the shock of the 2016 election, before hurricane Maria brought previously unimaginable destruction to Puerto Rico and Harvey drowned Houston under an unprecedented downpour; before the consecutive record-shattering wildfire seasons in California; before the water level in Lake Michigan rapidly swelled six feet to reveal its abnormal fluctuations as an existential threat to Chicago; before there was a new coronavirus circulating among the unlucky residents of Wuhan; some time before all of that I was sitting in the office of a disaster risk management consultant, trying to figure out where their profession had come from, why people hired them, and what their expertise was made of. I remember worrying that I’d forgotten to turn my tape recorder on.
Since the mid-1990s something fundamental had changed about the way corporations—especially banks at first but then also the firms to which they lent money—understood the world around them and their responsibilities in it. A string of weird, improbable accidents, crimes, and disasters in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s had inflicted huge financial losses that led in some cases to the collapse of companies that had looked perfectly healthy right up to the moment of their demise. Around the turn of the millennium the threat of the Y2K bug and then the trauma of the 9/11 attacks made undeniable a sense that had been growing among regulators and executives alike. The world was both more delicate and more volatile than they’d known. It wasn’t enough any more to analyze the risks of market downturns or take out insurance against bad weather and other non-financial shocks. It would be necessary from here on out to turn the growing uncertainty of the modern era into a matrix of risks that could be quantified, modeled, and managed through processes that could be audited to ensure compliance and assign liability when things went wrong. It was, critical accounting scholar Michael Power argued, the beginning of the risk management of everything, a relentless organizing of uncertainty to produce at least the appearance, if not the fact, of control and continuity in an increasingly complex, interdependent, and failure-prone world.
This rise of risk management in the corporate sector paralleled the rise of emergency management and “vital systems” security policy in government during the same period. Early in my graduate school career I’d gotten interested in the intersection of these two movements, and how they were envisioning and remaking the future.
That’s how I came to be in this consultant’s office, asking them to explain their work to me. They said a big part of their job was, through scenario planning, exercises, and business impact analyses, to equip executives with “memories of the future,” so that when some novel, unprecedented crisis erupted, the management team would in theory be able to say to themselves “I’ve been here before, I know what to do, who to call, and what resources to mobilize to get through it.”
The reason it makes any sense at all to talk about memories of the future is that we’re continually finding ourselves in situations where our memories of the past can’t help us make sense of what’s happening or help us to safety. The idea is to try to take the element of surprise out of rare or unpredictable future events that haven’t been meaningfully encountered before.
For non-experts, culture tends to serve this role. One way of understanding the recent surge of conspiracy theory culture is that it provides a way for people worried about the future to see themselves as savvy enough to uncover the truth about an unstable and unprecedented present — Qanon is an entire cosmology based on predicting the future. More broadly, and sort of more benignly, films and TV shows about disaster do this too. They aren’t just entertainment, they also give people frameworks for understanding disasters they haven’t themselves experienced. Usually, these frameworks are wildly misleading and not useful in any practical sense, though they do serve as an orienting point of reference when a vaguely similar crisis does emerge — think of how common it was for people to describe the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as like something they’d seen in a movie, or how many people rushed to watch the film Contagion when this pandemic began.
Decades worth of Hollywood movies, from the Andromeda Strain to 28 Days Later to the Planet of the Apes remakes, did us a disservice by portraying pandemics as apocalyptic events in which, within months, everyone is dead and/or civilization has fully collapsed. With that priming, any emerging disease that falls short of that mark seems, in the popular imagination, like not a real threat, like “just a bad flu.”
Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion was different, about as realistic a depiction of a pandemic as Hollywood could reasonably produce. I remember, in fact, going to a special panel discussion at Columbia University’s Low Library in 2011 or so celebrating the film’s contributions to public health (a Columbia professor had been a top consultant on the film). For me, the scene that first came to mind when this pandemic started was actually one of its final sequences, where Matt Damon’s character hosts a home prom for his still quarantined teenage daughter and her recently vaccinated boyfriend. Nearly everyone is still alive, in the end, but everything is completely different. That was what seemed most realistic, to me. That’s where we are now.
In some ways, for screenwriters and for most of the rest of us, it’s easier to imagine the total collapse of civilization than it is to imagine the sorts of world-changing catastrophes we’ll inevitably face in the coming years, which will be more shocking than anything in our memories but through which civilization will basically muddle on into the future. Likely the next thing won’t be a disease pandemic. Maybe it will be a Cascadia earthquake, or a wide-ranging cyber attack, an accidental, limited nuclear exchange, a democratic collapse, a catastrophic meltwater pulse, a long-lingering heat dome. Or something else to which we aren’t even really paying any attention at all at the moment but which will, in retrospect, seem to have been incubating just under the surface all along.
One of my favorite films to teach with is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a meticulously true-to-life satire of nuclear war strategy and a cinematic pantsing of rational choice theory. The film ends with the U.S. and U.S.S.R. blundering (plausibly) into nuclear annihilation, while Vera Lynn sings the World War II era classic “We’ll Meet Again.” Mostly that directorial choice gets read as an ironic twist of the thermonuclear knife — of course, after the doomsday machine goes off there’s no one left to meet. But more and more I think of it as Kubrick’s reminder to us that sooner or later technocratic systems always return us to the brink of catastrophe. If it’s not the Nazis, it’s the Cold War nuclear standoff. Kubrick seems to be saying here, at the end, that even if The Bomb doesn’t get you, then some other sunny day when some other too-clever bit of sociotechnical wizardry comes close to doing you in, you’ll be back again thinking about this film.
I’d been looking around the internet for a good version of that Vera Lynn song to leave you with, as a reminder that Covid isn’t the last time we’ll face something this daunting and this strange. Instead I found this recording by an Irish twentysomething I’d never heard of, who recorded the tune under lockdown in their bedroom. I think it’s perfect.
Play us out, Sammy.
Thank you everyone for reading along with me these last 68 weeks. I can’t say enough how much I’ve enjoyed hearing from those of you who’ve written back. With any luck for all of us it will be some time before you see me in your inbox again, unless it’s because I’ve launched my currently-in-development newsletter, Memories of the Future, which you can sign up for here. Until then!